Drying Room is a rendition of the classification that we use to perceive the world and to create various groupings and structures. It does not aim to define the concept of classification or even its necessity. Rather, it serves as a basis for examing questions of this nature. Drying Room reveals the notability of space, artwork, perception and the moment of it as the parts of the knowledge.

Simo Ripatti (b. 1975) is a Finnish visual artist. Studied at the sculpture department of the Finnish Academy of fine arts, Helsinki and Institute of fine Arts, Lahti, Finland.

Pilvi Ojala, paintings

Pilvi Ojala (b. 1973) observes inner drama in a calm, almost restrained way. In her recent works she depicts her dreams and feelings, making use of a long tradition of religious and mythological imagery.The strong connection to art history paired with an almost ruthless introspection gives these self portraits a strange, ambigious quality. Life is tragic, angst a daily companion, sorrow so ordinary it needs a body of it´s own. But when Ojala puts her figures in the limeligth of her small stages, it triggers laughter. There is great relief in seeing that what bugs us most, also make us laugh.

Ojala studied printmaking in Kuvataideakatemia, in Helsinki. She says that se slipped into painting almost accidentally. This might be why it is so easy to look at her paintings. The material itself is not a problem, rather, it is the most precise way to tell us about life seen through her eyes.

BLESS YOU

In his paintings Paavo Paunu (b. 1965) mediates the story of being human. It is essential to identify the limits and create platforms for confronting. There is space without clear form, based on emotions, hopes, beliefs and truth.

Paavo Paunu (b. 1965) graduated from The Painting Department at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 1990. He is working in the fields of painting, sculpture and installations . He has appointed several exhibitions abroad and in Finland.

How can we give form to the formless: to mental impressions, to fleeting thoughts, to riddles that have no answer? Paavo Paunu’s production induces a sense of the entire inexplicability of reality. It raises questions about who I am, what I experience, and what is important in life.
Paunu is a painter of space: he situates his paintings in exhibition spaces, the result being integrated wholes that resemble installations. He is also known for his sculptural paintings and painted sculptures. Right from the start of his artistic career, he made large-scale works, which soon began to acquire greater depth. Stages thus begin to emerge out of the paintings, extending in front of and behind the ground canvas.

Paunu’s production is not limited by the conventional tools of sculpture or painting, nor by any obvious role models, genres or references to theoretical sources. The sound of his works resonates from further away, from out of his own world, which is, nevertheless, human reality. His art is marked by psychological surrealism and expressive symbolism. The aim is to seek out the timeless core stratum of human beings, what motivates their actions, their feelings; ranging from goodness, trust and triumph to shame and unbelief. Paunu’s pictures reflect the uniqueness of experiences and the relationship of the finite human being with the unknown: with nature, with the depths of the mind, and fantasies.Martta Heikkilä

Karen Koltermann

The Shelter

In September 2018 Karen Koltermann had the opportunity to take part in a guided tour to the Gorham Cave Complex while she was an artist in residence in Gibraltar.
In a long gone time, which we call the Middle Palaeolithic, the Gorham Cave was inhabited by Neanderthals who, as has come to light in 2014, also made art. One 39,000 years old cross hatching is still visible and is deemed evidence of the inhabitants’ faculties of abstract thinking and their impressive ability to express themselves.

In the current exhibition in Toolbox, Koltermann shows new pictures on caves and crepuscular caves that are used as shelters. The works are based on the photos that Koltermann took while she visited the caves.

Between the walls of these habitations made by nature, time seems to stand still, when you consider for a moment the many fateful, beautiful, horrible, sad or just funny things the inhabitants may have experienced in the course of millenia – and which stories the already discovered and the yet to be discovered art works can tell us.

We should hope for another at least 39,000 years for this right to spontaneous artistic expression.

Two painters at the Toolbox
Ekkehard Vree creates, through boldly applied paint and through splodges that leak into amorphous forms, which in turn are drawn over, watercolour portraits with a lyrical appeal. Vree fascinates us with his spirited choice of unrealistic colour and his hesitant lines, achieving a truly intimate encounter with the portrayed people. Moving, poetic, elegant.
Vree lives and works in Viernheim, southern Hesse.

Andreas Wolf is an abstract painter, who, in contrast to Vree, works on his paintings slowly and for a long time. In his work, he strives to reach a tremendous compositional complexity. Every single element in a picture is supposed to enter into a dialogue with every other element; visual foci are set – and thwarted at the same. Tensions are hold in balance. The finished painting eludes easy intelligibility, but with close attention, paths through the picture become apparent. Wolf’s paintings are like wonderfully rich landscapes, inviting us to explore at leisure.
Wolf lives and works in Berlin.

I am interested in putting into visual form subjects involving humanity: various situations in life, problem solving abilities or inabilities, attitudes to oneself, towards other people and other species. Not to mention body language, non-verbal communication and the subconscious. Emotions, joys and sorrows alike, come across from the body in many ways. Perhaps this is the reason why I have chosen human shape as a basis of my works.

In the exhibition the humanity is both present and absent in my works. Plants, mice and parts of human body interlock. The works are linked into the ephemeral qualities of life and the cycles of nature. Decaying body feeds another living creature, which in turn fades and gives birth to something new.

In the airborne work ”Witches´ Broom” a mother mouse is climbing a chain. Weather beaten plants are bare with only few leaves. Mice and other rodents are survivors. They endure also the ultimate hardships, even beyond the human existence.

The works of Juha Sääski are dealing with the feeling of being safe and the feeling of
vulnerability as well as contrasting the experience of the imminently threatening with that of
positive everyday matters.

In the world of dejecting and horrific incidents life must go on. Through the news-flood we are
mentally living in the middle of catastrophies, even though we are, for the time being,
physically safe. For expressing the paradoxal nature of human life Sääski is juxtaposing
comical and naive elements to serious content. According to Charlie Chaplin, ‘life is a tragedy
in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot’.

Juha Sääski is a Finnish artist who has arranged several solo shows and participated in a
number of group shows in Germany, for instance in Berlin, Nuremberg, Ulm, Munich,
Mannheim, Viernheim (Kunsthaus & Kunstverein Viernheim), Koblenz (Museum Ludwig).

The Black Hunter

The work of Alexander Horn is known for its drifting along at the limits of what seems to be speakable, or, as one of the titles says: ‘Administrations and measures at the border of unlikeliness’.
Horn’s pictures, mostly begun as drawings and structured through limited imagery, are completed by diverse mixed media.
These drawings combine concise composition, overpainting and collagelike elements into a peculiar pictorial language which, despite its archaic impression of rigidity, hints at something detached and moving.

So viele Farben Schwarz

Frank Rossi | So viele Farben Schwarz

So viele Farben Schwarz is a Sound-Installation and Tonal Pattern Generator. In it, the twin strands of confrontation with automatons that are able to play music independently of humans and the idea of automated composition, of endlessly self-generating music, are combined to form an autopoietic, that is to say, both self-playing and self-composing music machine.
check full text on http://telesma.com/

Jesse Avdeikov

works with painting, animation and installation. He seeks for unpleasant, pleasant, absurd and noteworthy aspects of life. Hoping to find the meaning of life by accident while having fun.

Christine Candolin

I have been working with installations since early 1980s. Evolution of the human mind, especially the interconnectedness of matter and mind and the emergent properties connected to this, are the important constituents of my studies, and can be seen as allegorical reflections in my work.
The postmodern research on cognition and perceiving and our actions in the world has a relevant part in the ideas behind my working.

I´m wondering how we effect our world by perceiving it, experiencing it and living it. This is what I mean with the expression “matter and mind“. For where does the mind end and the “world” begin?
For me the world is not a given place outside us, my approach is phenomenological; the world unfolds in correlation with our own cultural and mental development, with our broadening cognition and knowledge. This is an interdependent and ongoing process.

My installations are allegorical reflections on this exploration.
My art is space-specific. I’m often assembling my installations to fill several rooms, so that the subject matter can be sensed through the connotations of the combined materials, form, and thought. Some of the materials I use have a transient character, like water, breeze, light, grease, and pigment powders. But also stones, steel, glass and other reflecting materials are often parts of the installations. I prefer to create installations in which beauty combines with austerity, meaning and thought.
My installation at the Toolbox is called My Mental Hadron-Collider.
It is a small videoinstallation. The work is an ecological statement of the ongoing human fall on this planet. It consists of a text, videoprojection into the material installation. The text can be read in the introduction of the installation.www.ccandolin.fi

Alisa Javits

“I found a suitcase. It belonged to Someone before me. A slightly naive artifact, with thoughts and dreams encapsulated in a case.”
Alisa Javits works in Helsinki with video and installation. She mixes photographic and filmic working methods. The main theme of the work is the contradiction between the inner and the outer in people.

Ritva Larsson

I ́m graduated from the University of Applied Sciences, Institute of Fine Arts Lahti. I also hold a masters degree in social sciences. With this combination as a background it ́s somewhat natural to explore “the social” by the means of arts. The theme ”street” is one cornerstone of my artwork. The artworks have been painted based on classical traditions. The combination creates an interesting tension between the traditional techniques and the modern themes, where “the social“ meets “the realism“. When these marginalized people are brought into the gallery, we are forced to face something we would prefer rather not to see or to think about. It is fascinating, how art can make a powerful statement about social issues. Yet the process itself is crucially slow. The situations evolve rather slowly on a canvas or on a piece of paper and an true, deeper dialogue among the painting and the world is not possible. In the end the piece remains as the artist ́s statement towards a certain issue but reproduces itself due the perception of the viewer.

Maija Närhinen

I make three-dimensional works and installations, which are composed of numerous parts. In my works I also combine different ways of depicting: two- and three-dimensional parts can form a single piece of work. In my artistic practice I am interested in for instance how to use one material to make an illusion of another material.

Maija Närhinen

In the Lost Luggage exhibition there will be my work called Luggage. It consists of easily movable stones: the stones packed in a suitcase have been made of water colour paintings on paper. Some of them are in a form of a paper roll and some of them have been formed to resemble real stones.http://www.maijanarhinen.fi

Katriina Rosavaara

Katriina Rosavaara (b. 1975, Finland) is Helsinki based visual artist. Lost Landscape – Revisited (2018) is a short film essay on family history, transgenerational war trauma, refugee and queer. Rosavaaras grandparents were forced to leave their home during the second world war. In the film Rosavaara travels back to her former family home town Sortavala (Russia) three times, in three different decades, reflecting changes on her own memories and on Sortavala city area.

Jocke Sederholm

“I’m a sculptor. I work mostly with wood. Much of my work deals with feelings and relations between people, I’m inspired by humans and humanity.”

Anniina Vainionpää

The subject of my recent work has been memory and personal history combined with how our individual experiences resemble one another and unify us despite our different backgrounds.

In my work I often depict aspects of humanity such as feeling of disparity and alienation. According to my personal experiences concepts of safe and familiar can transform (for example due to illness) into something strange and unrecognisable even terrifying.

The works represented at Lost Luggage exhibition are from “Oblivion” series. They are combinations of woodcut and monotype on paper.

Ilkka Sariola (b.1969) is an urban artist and priest based in Helsinki. He is known for his expressive drawings and performances. In january 2018 Sariola had a large exhibition Shit Happens at Gallery Orton, Helsinki and now he continues the theme is his first solo show in Berlin Galerie Toolbox.

Shit Happens 2 is a collection of drawings from four series called: Disgrace, Thirst, Easter drawings and Sunday drawings. Disgrace is about personal and collective shame. Thirst has echoes of the tradition of 14 Stations of the Cross. Easter drawing are in connection of religious themes as lamentation, pietá and ecce homo. Sunday drawings combine biblical and political topics. All drawings are mede with pencil and eraser on paper.